From data to applications in the Internet of Things

Con la crescita in complessità delle infrastrutture IT e la pervasività degli scenari di Internet of Things (IoT) emerge il bisogno di nuovi modelli computazionali basati su entità autonome capaci di portare a termine obiettivi di alto livello interagendo tra loro grazie al supporto di infrastrutture come il Fog Computing, per la vicinanza alle sorgenti dei dati, e del Cloud Computing per offrire servizi analitici complessi di back-end in grado di fornire risultati per milioni di utenti. Questi nuovi scenarii portano a ripensare il modo in cui il software viene progettato e sviluppato in una prospettiva agile. Le attività dei team di sviluppatori (Dev) dovrebbero essere strettamente legate alle attività dei team che supportano il Cloud (Ops) secondo nuove metodologie oggi note come DevOps. Tuttavia, data la mancanza di astrazioni adeguata a livello di linguaggio di programmazione, gli sviluppatori IoT sono spesso indotti a seguire approcci di sviluppo bottom-up che spesso risulta non adeguato ad affrontare la compessità delle applicazione del settore e l'eterogeneità dei compomenti software che le formano. Poichè le applicazioni monolitiche del passato appaiono difficilmente scalabili e gestibili in un ambiente Cloud con molteplici utenti, molti ritengono necessaria l'adozione di un nuovo stile architetturale, in cui un'applicazione dovrebbe essere vista come una composizione di micro-servizi, ciascuno dedicato a uno specifica funzionalità applicativa e ciascuno sotto la responsabilità di un piccolo team di sviluppatori, dall'analisi del problema al deployment e al management. Poichè al momento non si è ancora giunti a una definizione univoca e condivisa dei microservices e di altri concetti che emergono da IoT e dal Cloud, nè tantomento alla definzione di linguaggi sepcializzati per questo settore, la definzione di metamodelli custom associati alla produzione automatica del software di raccordo con le infrastrutture potrebbe aiutare un team di sviluppo ad elevare il livello di astrazione, incapsulando in una software factory aziendale i dettagli implementativi. Grazie a sistemi di produzione del sofware basati sul Model Driven Software Development (MDSD), l'approccio top-down attualmente carente può essere recuperato, permettendo di focalizzare l'attenzione sulla business logic delle applicazioni. Nella tesi viene mostrato un esempio di questo possibile approccio, partendo dall'idea che un'applicazione IoT sia in primo luogo un sistema software distribuito in cui l'interazione tra componenti attivi (modellati come attori) gioca un ruolo fondamentale.

Effekter av Internet of Things : Scenariobaserad studie som beskriver inledande effekter av Internet of Things i en verksamhet

Med begreppet "Internet of Things" menas att ett objekt ur den riktiga världen blir en del av internet. Tunabyggen i Borlänge planerar att implementera ett sådant informationssystem som med hjälp av sensorer och en ständig internetuppkoppling håller uppsikt över temperatur och luftfuktighet i utvalda lokaler. Det är ett enkelt system som till synes inte har så stora effekter på den nuvarande verksamheten. De ekonomiska effekterna går ofta att räkna på i förhand men effekterna på personal, miljö och rutiner kan glömmas bort. Vi har därför med detta examensarbete undersökt vilka inledande effekter som kan tänkas uppkomma efter implementering av ett nytt informationssystem med "Internet of Things" funktionalitet i en verksamhet. Detta sker inom kategorierna ekonomi, arbetsmiljö, miljöpåverkan och systemförvaltning. För att kunna besvara detta har vi gjort en fallstudie baserad på en scenariometodik som består av fyra faser. Fas 1, där vi fick vårt Case och skapade en förståelse för scenariofältet. Fas 2, där vi identifierade nyckelfaktorer. Detta har gjorts genom en litteraturstudie samt intervju med berörd personal på Tunabyggen. Fas 3, där analysen av dessa nyckelfaktorer skedde genom nulägesanalys och framtidsanalys av nyckelfaktorer. Fas 4, där vi genererade scenarier av de analyserade nyckelfaktorerna. Det har sedan gjorts en SWOT-analys för att belysa styrkor, svagheter, möjligheter och hot. Resultatet visar tydliga tecken på att det kommer att bli många effekter för Tunabyggen efter implementering av det nya informationssystemet som yttrar sig i alla kategorier. Slutsatsen är att vid implementation av ett informationssystem som detta är effekterna många. Detta är något som vi anser bör beaktas av alla verksamheter som har tankar på att införskaffa ett nytt informationssystem. De bör inte bara utvärdera informationssystem rent ekonomiskt utan borde ta i beaktning att det finns ett antal andra faktorer som har en avgörande roll om implementation av informationssystem ska bli lyckad.

Distributed and compressed MIKEY mode to secure end-to-end communications in the Internet of things.

Multimedia Internet KEYing protocol (MIKEY) aims at establishing secure credentials between two communicating entities. However, existing MIKEY modes fail to meet the requirements of low-power and low-processing devices. To address this issue, we combine two previously proposed approaches to introduce a new distributed and compressed MIKEY mode for the Internet of Things. Indeed, relying on a cooperative approach, a set of third parties is used to discharge the constrained nodes from heavy computational operations. Doing so, the preshared mode is used in the constrained part of network, while the public key mode is used in the unconstrained part of the network. Furthermore, to mitigate the communication cost we introduce a new header compression scheme that reduces the size of MIKEY’s header from 12 Bytes to 3 Bytes in the best compression case. Preliminary results show that our proposed mode is energy preserving whereas its security properties are preserved untouched.

Modelling of an efficient dynamic smart solar photovoltaic power grid system

A smart solar photovoltaic grid system is an advent of innovation coherence of information and communications technology (ICT) with power systems control engineering via the internet [1]. This thesis designs and demonstrates a smart solar photovoltaic grid system that is selfhealing, environmental and consumer friendly, but also with the ability to accommodate other renewable sources of energy generation seamlessly, creating a healthy competitive energy industry and optimising energy assets efficiency. This thesis also presents the modelling of an efficient dynamic smart solar photovoltaic power grid system by exploring the maximum power point tracking efficiency, optimisation of the smart solar photovoltaic array through modelling and simulation to improve the quality of design for the solar photovoltaic module. In contrast, over the past decade quite promising results have been published in literature, most of which have not addressed the basis of the research questions in this thesis. The Levenberg-Marquardt and sparse based algorithms have proven to be very effective tools in helping to improve the quality of design for solar photovoltaic modules, minimising the possible relative errors in this thesis. Guided by theoretical and analytical reviews in literature, this research has carefully chosen the MatLab/Simulink software toolbox for modelling and simulation experiments performed on the static smart solar grid system. The auto-correlation coefficient results obtained from the modelling experiments give an accuracy of 99% with negligible mean square error (MSE), root mean square error (RMSE) and standard deviation. This thesis further explores the design and implementation of a robust real-time online solar photovoltaic monitoring system, establishing a comparative study of two solar photovoltaic tracking systems which provide remote access to the harvested energy data. This research made a landmark innovation in designing and implementing a unique approach for online remote access solar photovoltaic monitoring systems providing updated information of the energy produced by the solar photovoltaic module at the site location. In addressing the challenge of online solar photovoltaic monitoring systems, Darfon online data logger device has been systematically integrated into the design for a comparative study of the two solar photovoltaic tracking systems examined in this thesis. The site location for the comparative study of the solar photovoltaic tracking systems is at the National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences, Taiwan, R.O.C. The overall comparative energy output efficiency of the azimuthal-altitude dual-axis over the 450 stationary solar photovoltaic monitoring system as observed at the research location site is about 72% based on the total energy produced, estimated money saved and the amount of CO2 reduction achieved. Similarly, in comparing the total amount of energy produced by the two solar photovoltaic tracking systems, the overall daily generated energy for the month of July shows the effectiveness of the azimuthal-altitude tracking systems over the 450 stationary solar photovoltaic system. It was found that the azimuthal-altitude dual-axis tracking systems were about 68.43% efficient compared to the 450 stationary solar photovoltaic systems. Lastly, the overall comparative hourly energy efficiency of the azimuthal-altitude dual-axis over the 450 stationary solar photovoltaic energy system was found to be 74.2% efficient. Results from this research are quite promising and significant in satisfying the purpose of the research objectives and questions posed in the thesis. The new algorithms introduced in this research and the statistical measures applied to the modelling and simulation of a smart static solar photovoltaic grid system performance outperformed other previous works in reviewed literature. Based on this new implementation design of the online data logging systems for solar photovoltaic monitoring, it is possible for the first time to have online on-site information of the energy produced remotely, fault identification and rectification, maintenance and recovery time deployed as fast as possible. The results presented in this research as Internet of things (IoT) on smart solar grid systems are likely to offer real-life experiences especially both to the existing body of knowledge and the future solar photovoltaic energy industry irrespective of the study site location for the comparative solar photovoltaic tracking systems. While the thesis has contributed to the smart solar photovoltaic grid system, it has also highlighted areas of further research and the need to investigate more on improving the choice and quality design for solar photovoltaic modules. Finally, it has also made recommendations for further research in the minimization of the absolute or relative errors in the quality and design of the smart static solar photovoltaic module.

A Collaborative Mobile Crowdsensing System for Smart Cities

Nowadays words like Smart City, Internet of Things, Environmental Awareness surround us with the growing interest of Computer Science and Engineering communities. Services supporting these paradigms are definitely based on large amounts of sensed data, which, once obtained and gathered, need to be analyzed in order to build maps, infer patterns, extract useful information. Everything is done in order to achieve a better quality of life. Traditional sensing techniques, like Wired or Wireless Sensor Network, need an intensive usage of distributed sensors to acquire real-world conditions. We propose SenSquare, a Crowdsensing approach based on smartphones and a central coordination server for time-and-space homogeneous data collecting. SenSquare relies on technologies such as CoAP lightweight protocol, Geofencing and the Military Grid Reference System.

Routex: un Router Multitecnologia per Internet of Things

L'Internet of Things (IoT) è oggetto di grande interesse per la ricerca e per l'industria. Le numerose tecnologie che sono state sviluppate rendono possibile la creazione di nuovi e utili servizi, ma introducono problemi legati alla reciproca incompatibilità. Nell'elaborato si analizza nel dettaglio questa situazione e si descrive l'implementazione di un sistema che ha come obiettivo la realizzazione di una rete composta da dispositivi che fanno uso di tecnologie differenti. Il progetto usa un Raspberry Pi come router, il cui scopo è quello di gestire le differenze fra gli standard di comunicazione utilizzati. Le tecnologie wireless supportate sono: WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, nRF24L01 e moduli radio 433MHz. Sulla rete cosi formata è inoltre possibile lo sviluppo di applicazioni IoT, grazie alle logiche di funzionamento messe a disposizione dal sistema.

Internet das Coisas aplicada a negócios – Um estudo bibliométrico

The Internet of Things is a technological innovation, based on artifacts and consolidated concepts like Internet and Smart Objects. Its growing business application of Internet of Things makes necessary to evaluate the strategy, benefits and challenges of this technology application. The main objective of this paper is to present the definition of Internet of Things, based on the most cited articles and as a secondary objective, present publication statistics classified by year and related terms, like ubiquitous computation. One of the conclusions is that papers related to business represent only 5% of all the papers analyzed by this research, considering just the papers published on journals. It shows that there is a great field to research on Business Administration.

Gesture based IoT light control for smart clothing

In this paper, a smart wireless wristband is proposed. The potential of innovative gesture based interactivity with connected lighting solutions is reviewed. The solution is intended to offer numerous benefits, in terms of ease of use, and enhanced dynamic interactive functionality. A comparative analysis will be carried out between this work and existing solutions. The evolution of lighting and gesture controls will be discussed and an overview of alternative applications will be provided, as part of the critical analysis.

Environmental sensing with the Internet of Things

Abstract: After developing many sensor networks using custom protocols to save energy and minimise code complexity - we have now experimented with standards-based designs. These use IPv6 (6LowPAN), RPL routing, Coap for interfaces and data access and protocol buffers for data encapsulation. Deployments in the Cairngorm mountains have shown the capabilities and limitations of the implementations. This seminar will outline the hardware and software we used and discuss the advantages of the more standards-based approach. At the same time we have been progressing with high quality imaging of cultural heritage using the RTIdomes - so some results and designs will be shown as well. So this seminar will cover peat-bogs to museums, binary-HTTP-like REST to 3500 year old documents written on clay.

Interoperability Challenges in Internet of Things Systems: a Service-Oriented Computing Approach

Internet of Things systems are pervasive systems evolved from cyber-physical to large-scale systems. Due to the number of technologies involved, software development involves several integration challenges. Among them, the ones preventing proper integration are those related to the system heterogeneity, and thus addressing interoperability issues. From a software engineering perspective, developers mostly experience the lack of interoperability in the two phases of software development: programming and deployment. On the one hand, modern software tends to be distributed in several components, each adopting its most-appropriate technology stack, pushing programmers to code in a protocol- and data-agnostic way. On the other hand, each software component should run in the most appropriate execution environment and, as a result, system architects strive to automate the deployment in distributed infrastructures. This dissertation aims to improve the development process by introducing proper tools to handle certain aspects of the system heterogeneity. Our effort focuses on three of these aspects and, for each one of those, we propose a tool addressing the underlying challenge. The first tool aims to handle heterogeneity at the transport and application protocol level, the second to manage different data formats, while the third to obtain optimal deployment. To realize the tools, we adopted a linguistic approach, i.e.\ we provided specific linguistic abstractions that help developers to increase the expressive power of the programming language they use, writing better solutions in more straightforward ways. To validate the approach, we implemented use cases to show that the tools can be used in practice and that they help to achieve the expected level of interoperability. In conclusion, to move a step towards the realization of an integrated Internet of Things ecosystem, we target programmers and architects and propose them to use the presented tools to ease the software development process.

Wireless Power Link Design for Both High-Power Inductive Coupling and Smart Metasurfaces Exploitation

As future technologies are going to be autonomous under the umbrella of the Internet of things (IoT) we can expect WPT to be the solution for intelligent devices. WPT has many industrial and medical applications both in the near-field and far-field domains. Considering the impact of WPT, this thesis is an attempt to design and realize both near-field and far-field WPT solutions for different application scenarios. A 27 MHz high frequency inductive wireless power link has been designed together with the Class-E switching inverter to compensate for the efficiency loss because of the varying weak coupling between transmitter and receiver because of their mutual misalignment. Then a system of three coils was introduced for SWIPT. The outer coil for WPT and the inner two coils were designed to fulfil the purpose of communication and testing, operating at frequencies different from the WPT coil. In addition to that, a trapping filter technique has also been adopted to ensure the EM isolation of the coils. Moreover, a split ring resonator-based dual polarization converter has been designed with good efficiency over a wide frequency range. The gap or cuts have been introduced in the adjacent sides of the square ring to make it a dual-polarization converter. The converter is also stable over a wide range of incident angles. Furthermore, a meta-element based intelligent surface has been designed to work in the reflection mode at 5 GHz. In this research activity, interdigital capacitors (IDCs) instead of ICs are introduced and a thin layer of the HfZrO between substrate and meta elements is placed whose response can be tuned and controlled with the applied voltage to achieve IRS.

Surveillance risks in IoT applied to smart cities

Nowadays, cities deal with unprecedented pollution and overpopulation problems, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are supporting them in facing these issues and becoming increasingly smart. IoT sensors embedded in public infrastructure can provide granular data on the urban environment, and help public authorities to make their cities more sustainable and efficient. Nonetheless, this pervasive data collection also raises high surveillance risks, jeopardizing privacy and data protection rights. Against this backdrop, this thesis addresses how IoT surveillance technologies can be implemented in a legally compliant and ethically acceptable fashion in smart cities. An interdisciplinary approach is embraced to investigate this question, combining doctrinal legal research (on privacy, data protection, criminal procedure) with insights from philosophy, governance, and urban studies. The fundamental normative argument of this work is that surveillance constitutes a necessary feature of modern information societies. Nonetheless, as the complexity of surveillance phenomena increases, there emerges a need to develop more fine-attuned proportionality assessments to ensure a legitimate implementation of monitoring technologies. This research tackles this gap from different perspectives, analyzing the EU data protection legislation and the United States and European case law on privacy expectations and surveillance. Specifically, a coherent multi-factor test assessing privacy expectations in public IoT environments and a surveillance taxonomy are proposed to inform proportionality assessments of surveillance initiatives in smart cities. These insights are also applied to four use cases: facial recognition technologies, drones, environmental policing, and smart nudging. Lastly, the investigation examines competing data governance models in the digital domain and the smart city, reviewing the EU upcoming data governance framework. It is argued that, despite the stated policy goals, the balance of interests may often favor corporate strategies in data sharing, to the detriment of common good uses of data in the urban context.

Wireless solutions for the industrial internet of things

The fourth industrial revolution is paving the way for Industrial Internet of Things applications where industrial assets (e.g., robotic arms, valves, pistons) are equipped with a large number of wireless devices (i.e., microcontroller boards that embed sensors and actuators) to enable a plethora of new applications, such as analytics, diagnostics, monitoring, as well as supervisory, and safety control use-cases. Nevertheless, current wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even private 5G networks, cannot fulfill all the requirements set up by the Industry 4.0 paradigm, thus opening up new 6G-oriented research trends, such as the use of THz frequencies. In light of the above, this thesis provides (i) a broad overview of the main use-cases, requirements, and key enabling wireless technologies foreseen by the fourth industrial revolution, and (ii) proposes innovative contributions, both theoretical and empirical, to enhance the performance of current and future wireless technologies at different levels of the protocol stack. In particular, at the physical layer, signal processing techniques are being exploited to analyze two multiplexing schemes, namely Affine Frequency Division Multiplexing and Orthogonal Chirp Division Multiplexing, which seem promising for high-frequency wireless communications. At the medium access layer, three protocols for intra-machine communications are proposed, where one is based on LoRa at 2.4 GHz and the others work in the THz band. Different scheduling algorithms for private industrial 5G networks are compared, and two main proposals are described, i.e., a decentralized scheme that leverages machine learning techniques to better address aperiodic traffic patterns, and a centralized contention-based design that serves a federated learning industrial application. Results are provided in terms of numerical evaluations, simulation results, and real-world experiments. Several improvements over the state-of-the-art were obtained, and the description of up-and-running testbeds demonstrates the feasibility of some of the theoretical concepts when considering a real industry plant.

Asynchronous Contact Tracing, Fighting Pandemics with Internet of Things

La pandemia da COVID-19 ha cambiato le nostre vite obbligandoci a vivere mesi di lockdown, distanziamento sociale ed uso delle mascherine. Il distanziamento sociale e l'uso delle mascherine, anche dopo la prima fase della pandemia, sono state le contromisure principali in quanto permettevano di limitare i contagi permettendo comunque alla gente di uscire di casa. Tutte queste contromisure hanno creato gravi danni all'economia del paese e alla vita personale dei cittadini. Dalla fase iniziale della pandemia si è capito che per gestirla al meglio era necessario effettuare il numero maggiore di tamponi possibili per monitorare al meglio la diffusione del virus ma ciò non era possibile in quanto non esistevano le tecnologie necessarie per testare milioni di persone al giorno. Da questa necessità sono nati i sistemi di Contact Tracing, sistemi che permettono di monitorare in modo anonimo e protetto i contatti sociali delle persone così da capire se sono entrate in contatto con persone infette dal COVID-19 e solo in quel caso effettuare un tampone in modo tale da verificare se sono stati contagiati o meno. Tutti i sistemi di Contact tracing sviluppati ad oggi hanno mostrato problemi relativi alla protezione dei dati, alla scarsa ed inefficace comunicazione e non hanno ridotto al meglio il numero di tamponi effettuati per rilevare realmente coloro che erano stati contagiati avendo quindi uno scarso utilizzo soprattutto a causa della poca fiducia degli utenti riguardo l'utilizzo dei loro dati ed al fatto che dovevano autodichiararsi positivi. Con questa tesi presenterò una nuova tecnica per effettuare il Contact Tracing che combina l'utilizzo del Group Testing all'utilizzo dell'IoT e delle reti per tracciare i contatti tra gli utenti ed il virus chiamata Asynchronous Contact Tracing. Mostrerò come è stato progettato e sviluppato e mostrerò le performance grazie a degli esperimenti reali.